Gustav Klimt's 1907 portrait of the Viennese hostess Adele Bloch-Bauer is the most expensive single painting Klimt ever made. Commissioned by Adele's husband Ferdinand, hung in Vienna until 1938, looted by the SS during the Anschluss, displayed in a Vienna museum for 58 years, and returned in 2006 to Adele's niece Maria Altmann after an eight-year US Supreme Court case that changed international restitution law.

Gustav Klimt's The Kiss, painted between 1907 and 1908 in his Vienna studio, is the central picture of his Golden Phase and one of the most reproduced images in the history of European painting. A close reading of the gold-leaf technique, the Byzantine and medieval references, the identity of the two figures, and how a single canvas became the synthesis of everything the Vienna Secession had been arguing for since 1897.

In the autumn of 1905, a small group of French painters hung a room of pictures at the Paris Salon d'Automne in colours nobody had used before. A critic called the room a cage of wild beasts. The name stuck. The movement was two years long, the colour decisions were permanent, and almost every painter who broke from the academy in the next twenty years walked through the door the Fauves opened.

The melting watches in Dalí's 1931 painting did not come from nowhere. They came from a Catalan shoreline, from a piece of Camembert cheese left on a table, from Mannerist elongation, from Bosch's morphing bodies, from Fuseli's dream as subject, and from Böcklin's silent atmosphere. The literal landscape, the cheese, the four precursors, and what Dalí added that nobody before him had said.

A young woman lies naked on a white bed staring directly at the viewer. Her maid brings flowers from a client. Her cat arches its back at the foot of the bed. Manet painted Olympia in 1863, exhibited her in 1865, and the Salon riot that followed ended one century of European painting and began another.

An engineer who became a sculptor, then a sculptor who became a draughtsman in colour. Three rules — balance, colour, movement — carried Calder's whole career.

Five canvases, fifty years. How Henri Matisse rebuilt painting around colour — from the wild-beasts of 1905 to the scissors he picked up in 1941.